Key takeaways
- Expect a home edge in any team sport, but judge a team's home record against the league's own home share rather than against 50%.
- Treat one season's home and away split as mostly noise: with 19 matches on each side, a gap of 20 percentage points is within ordinary variation.
- Read the empty-stadium studies as evidence that crowds shape refereeing, not as proof that crowds alone create home advantage.
- When matches move to neutral or overseas venues, shrink or drop any home term in a model, as World Rugby did from 1 July 2026.
Home advantage is real: in every major professional team sport studied in England and North America, teams do better at home than away against the same opponents. It was largest in soccer — Pollard's 1986 analysis found home teams collecting about 64% of all points in the English Football League — and it has been shrinking in several sports for decades. The evidence on causes points to a mix of familiarity with the venue, travel, and referee decisions nudged by crowds. When matches were played behind closed doors in 2020–21, the clearest change in soccer was in refereeing rather than results, while rugby union's home records fell further.
The interesting part is underneath that summary: how the effect is counted, why the empty-stadium seasons did not settle the argument, and why one governing body has now stopped building it into its rankings.
How big it is, and how it is counted
The simplest measure divides the points a team, or a whole league, earns at home by the points it earns in total. In a balanced schedule, where every team meets every other home and away, 50% would mean no advantage.
Pollard's retrospective study of English league football is the usual starting point. Its abstract reports the 64% figure, says home advantage had changed very little since the league formed in 1888, and notes that it was smaller in local derbies, the FA Cup and non-professional football but larger in the European Cup, growing as that competition progressed. Of the major professional team sports in England and North America, soccer's was the largest.
A longer view came in 2005, when Pollard and Pollard calculated home advantage for every season of the main professional leagues in North America and England — more than 400,000 games, starting in 1876 for baseball. Three findings stand out:
- Every sport's home advantage was highest in its early years.
- It had declined over the previous two decades in ice hockey, basketball and English football.
- Baseball's was consistently the lowest and had barely changed in a century.
What 64% means for one team
Take a side that finishes a season with 60 points and assume it matched the league-wide split. Then 60 × 0.64 = 38.4 points came at home and 21.6 away: a gap of almost 17 points from playing the same opponents in different places. The assumption is the weak link, because 64% is an average and individual teams sit above and below it.
Four explanations, and what each predicts
The argument about causes has lasted because each explanation predicts something slightly different, and the predictions can be tested.
| Explanation | What it predicts | What the studies cited here found |
|---|---|---|
| The crowd lifts the home players | Advantage shrinks without spectators | Mixed: soccer results barely moved behind closed doors, rugby union's did |
| The crowd sways the officials | The foul and card gap closes without spectators | Supported: the gap disappeared in empty stadiums |
| Travel tires the visitors | Smaller advantage in local derbies; long-run trends track travel | Consistent with smaller derby advantages and with the long-term trends |
| Familiarity with the venue | Advantage drops when a team moves ground | Supported: a measurable drop in the first season after a move |
The familiarity result is the cleanest. Pollard examined 37 baseball, basketball and ice hockey teams that moved to new stadiums in the same city between 1987 and 2001. Home advantage in the first season at the new ground was significantly lower than in the last season at the old one, crowd size and density did not explain the difference, and he estimated that about 24% of the advantage may be lost in a move.
The long-term trends pointed the same way: the 2005 authors read them as some evidence that travel and familiarity contribute, and little support for crowd effects. The 1986 study had already concluded that, in soccer, familiarity with conditions mattered more than crowd support or travel fatigue.
What empty stadiums revealed
The pandemic produced an experiment nobody could have arranged: hundreds of professional matches with no crowd, under otherwise normal rules. Several research teams analysed them, and their findings do not line up neatly.
Soccer: the officiating changed more than the results
Fabian Wunderlich and colleagues analysed more than 40,000 matches from the main European leagues, including more than 1,000 played without spectators in 2020. With fans present, away teams were sanctioned more; without them, the gap in fouls, yellow cards and red cards disappeared. Home teams' edge in shots and shots on target also fell significantly. Yet home advantage itself showed only a non-significant decrease, and the authors concluded that spectators "do not seem to be the main driving factor" of it.
Luke Benz and Michael Lopez re-estimated the effect across 17 professional leagues with a bivariate Poisson model, which treats home and away goals as counts rather than collapsing them into a margin. Their estimate of home advantage in goals fell in 11 leagues and rose in the other six, England's and Italy's top divisions among them. Cards told a more consistent story: the home advantage in yellow cards declined in 15 of the 17 leagues.
Both papers flag the same problem: every empty-stadium match was also a pandemic match. Wunderlich's team point out that this leaves the comparison without a true control group, and Benz and Lopez that months of disrupted training could have changed results on their own. The comparison therefore isolates "no fans plus everything else that changed in 2020" rather than the crowd alone.
Rugby union: a sharper fall
Adrien Sedeaud and colleagues compared seasons from 2012–13 to 2020–21 in both sports. The share of matches won by the away side rose from 28.5% to 32.5% in soccer and from 38.0% to 42.8% in rugby union. In England's Premiership Rugby, home wins fell from 55.8% with spectators to 45.8% without; in France they fell from 64.5% to 55.1% in the Top 14 and from 64.6% to 55.7% in Pro D2. The authors concluded that home advantage vanished in the Premiership and the Celtic League in 2020–21.
A working paper by Federico Fioravanti, Fernando Delbianco and Fernando Tohmé pointed the same way with a wider sample: across 1,027 rugby union matches from 11 tournaments in 10 countries, home teams won fewer matches and their points difference decreased while crowds were absent.
Two cautions belong beside those numbers. The no-crowd rugby figures rest on one disrupted season, and the uncertainty is wide: the Premiership's 45.8% carries a margin of about 13 percentage points either way. And Sedeaud's team list among their limitations that team strength and recent form were not taken into account.
Why the two sports may have diverged
None of these studies tested why rugby's home records moved more than soccer's, so what follows is interpretation, not finding. The rugby estimates come from fewer matches in fewer competitions, one of the soccer studies (Benz and Lopez) adjusted for team strength while the rugby comparison used raw win shares, and 2020–21 disrupted each competition differently. Any of those could produce the gap. What the evidence does support is narrower and more useful: crowds clearly shape officiating, and home advantage has more than one cause.
A ranking system that stopped assuming it
Ranking systems must decide whether to correct for venue. Since the men's rankings began in 2003, World Rugby's calculation has credited the home team with three extra rating points, a handicap meant to offset the benefit of playing at home, which also meant a home win often moved a team less than an away win.
From 1 July 2026 that weighting is gone. World Rugby's June 2026 announcement explained that many tournaments are now held in centralised or out-of-country locations for strategic, commercial or financial reasons, so the weighting often penalised the nominal host. Its examples included Fiji playing three "home" Nations Championship matches in the UK, and it counted some 20 internationals scheduled at neutral venues before the end of 2026.
The point generalises. A home term is an assumption about where matches are played and how much that matters, and when the schedule stops matching the assumption, the term has to change. Anyone building a match model faces the same four decisions:
- Whether to include one. Leaving it out ignores one of the most consistent findings in sports research.
- How big to make it. Benz and Lopez found home advantage differing clearly between leagues even before the pandemic, so one constant for every competition is a simplification.
- Whether it should drift. The declines Pollard documented mean a value fitted to old seasons overstates the edge today.
- What counts as home. Neutral venues, the reason World Rugby changed its formula, need a value of zero.
How sports simulation engines work covers where adjustments like this sit inside a match model.
Reading a home and away split without fooling yourself
Home and away records are small samples, which makes them easy to over-read. Suppose a team plays 19 home and 19 away league matches, as in a 20-team double round robin, and wins 12 at home (63%) but only 8 away (42%).
Treat each match as a win or not a win and assume a true win rate near one half. The standard error of a win percentage over 19 matches is √(0.25 ÷ 19) ≈ 0.115, about 11.5 percentage points, and the standard error of the difference between two such percentages is about √2 × 11.5 ≈ 16 points. The 21-point gap is only about 1.3 standard errors: the kind of split a team with no special home edge produces regularly.
Three checks before reading anything into a split:
- Compare it with the league's home share, not with 50%. Every team is expected to do better at home.
- Check the schedule. The 2005 study notes the problems unbalanced schedules cause; a team that met the strongest sides away will look worse on the road.
- Count the seasons. One season's split is mostly noise; a pattern that persists across several is worth a second look.
The same caution applies to a simulated season. In Pro Football GM Club Soccer, you draft an XI from a pool built from real players' careers, with ratings that are the game's own estimates, and the simulation plays out a league campaign reported in wins, draws and losses. One campaign is a single draw from the model, so any pattern in it deserves the same scepticism as a real season's; completed runs can be saved and compared with the next attempt, which is the fairer test. 24-0 Rugby Draft Pro League runs a 24-match rugby union campaign on the same principle. Neither describes or forecasts a real competition.
Why one result says so little about the probability behind it is the subject of understanding sports sim probability. For how results become a table, see how soccer league tables work, and for how tries and kicks add up, how rugby scoring works. There are more guides arranged by sport on the sports hub, and the studio's simulation titles are listed under sports GM games.
Good to know
Frequently asked questions
What does home advantage mean in sports?
Which sport has the biggest home advantage?
Did playing without fans remove home advantage?
Do referees favour the home team?
Why did World Rugby remove home advantage from its rankings?
Sources
- Home advantage in soccer: a retrospective analysis (Pollard, 1986), abstract (opens in a new tab)Journal of Sports Sciences, via NCBI PubMed E-utilities — accessed
- Long-term trends in home advantage in professional team sports in North America and England (1876–2003), abstract (opens in a new tab)Journal of Sports Sciences, via NCBI PubMed E-utilities — accessed
- Evidence of a reduced home advantage when a team moves to a new stadium (Pollard, 2002), abstract (opens in a new tab)Journal of Sports Sciences, via NCBI PubMed E-utilities — accessed
- How does spectator presence affect football? Home advantage remains in European top-class football matches played without spectators during the COVID-19 pandemic (opens in a new tab)PLOS One (Wunderlich, Weigelt, Rein and Memmert, 2021) — accessed
- Estimating the change in soccer's home advantage during the Covid-19 pandemic using bivariate Poisson regression (opens in a new tab)AStA Advances in Statistical Analysis via PubMed Central (Benz and Lopez, 2021) — accessed
- The COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on Away and Home Victories in Soccer and Rugby Union (opens in a new tab)Frontiers in Sports and Active Living via PubMed Central (Sedeaud et al., 2021) — accessed
- Home advantage and crowd attendance: Evidence from rugby during the Covid 19 pandemic (opens in a new tab)arXiv (Fioravanti, Delbianco and Tohmé, 2021) — accessed
- New World Rugby Rankings criteria (opens in a new tab)World Rugby — accessed
League, team and athlete names appear here only to identify the rules, records and history being discussed. Reign Creative LLC's sports games are not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by any league, team, players' association or athlete, and all names and marks belong to their owners.
About the author
Reign Creative LLC — The independent app studio that builds the apps covered on this site and publishes every article here. On Google Play it publishes as Reign Collective Apps.
We use AI tools to help research, draft and edit our articles. Each article lists the sources its factual claims rely on, and details about our apps come from their live Google Play listings. No article on this site has been reviewed by an independent expert unless the reviewer is named on it.
No person at Reign Creative LLC has read this article in full. It was published after automated checks and an AI editorial review, which are described in our editorial policy and are not the same as a person reading every sentence.
Spotted an error? Tell us — how corrections are handled is set out in our editorial policy.
